Open Access. Powered by Scholars. Published by Universities.®
- Discipline
Articles 1 - 2 of 2
Full-Text Articles in Arts and Humanities
Beyond The Looking-Glass: The Intensity Of The Gothic Dream In Nineteenth-Century British Literature, Anne N. Nagel
Beyond The Looking-Glass: The Intensity Of The Gothic Dream In Nineteenth-Century British Literature, Anne N. Nagel
Department of English: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research
The dream is a contested space in terms of allegory and affect, the non-conscious intensity associated with feelings and emotions. Readers tend to express disappointment when a narrative turns out to be “just a dream,” yet the dream is uniquely capable of evoking powerful affective intensity. Yet most scholarship approaches the literary dream through representational interpretation, which not only overlooks the intensity of affect, but dampens it. The dreamer cannot interpret the dream while engrossed in dreaming. By taking into consideration the perspective of the dreamer, this thesis moves beyond the reflective lens of symbolic interpretation to explore the intensity …
Surviving The City: Resistance And Plant Life In Woolf’S Jacob’S Room And Barnes’ Nightwood, Ria Banerjee
Surviving The City: Resistance And Plant Life In Woolf’S Jacob’S Room And Barnes’ Nightwood, Ria Banerjee
Publications and Research
In Jacob’s Room (1922) and Nightwood (1936), Virginia Woolf and Djuna Barnes use plant life to express a profound ambivalence about the masculine-inflected ordering functions of art and morality. They show that these processes codify lived experience and distance it from the feminine and sexual. To counter this turn towards the urban inauthentic, both novels depict non-urban spaces to upend conventional notions of usefulness. They fixate on evanescent flowers, wild forests, and untillable fields as sites of resistance whose fragility and remoteness are strengths. In Jacob’s Room, I argue that the eponymous protagonist is destroyed by his conventional education …